


Reliance

by alp



Category: Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016)
Genre: F/M, Missing Scene, Self-Reflection
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-01-03
Updated: 2017-01-03
Packaged: 2018-09-14 13:39:49
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,062
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9183958
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/alp/pseuds/alp
Summary: In the moments before the crew ambushes the inspection team on Scarif, Jyn reflects, acknowledges a feeling, and makes a couple of plans.





	

**Author's Note:**

> This is mainly me trying to get a feel for Jyn, so it's pretty basic stuff. Hopefully I'll be able to write more substantial fic in the future.

On the wall of a cargo hold, in the belly of a twice-pilfered ship, pressed into the hard body of the spy who had almost killed her father, she rested, and waited.

Her skin prickled. Her breaths came even, measured, slow, matching time with those of the men around her. Anticipation gnawed at her stomach, but she had learned long ago how to tamp that down. The others held themselves steady, impassive. They were tested, hardened. Like her. 

It had been a long time since she'd had anything approaching real comrades. The past several years had been filled with transitory partnerships, born of convenience and briefly intersecting aims, each one crumbling at the reassertion of self-preservation. In the early days, she'd met people who might have been more than that, had she let them. People who sought her out, who asked after her. People whose eyes glittered with the pain of loss and betrayal when she cast them off. But she'd still been reeling from her abandonment. That happens to a girl twice, it’ll teach her a thing or two about forming attachments -- namely, that she shouldn’t.

Now, she was surrounded by an entire team, a team that wouldn’t exist if it weren’t for her, on a mission that was as personal as it was essential. It was surreal. Surreal and different, in the most baffling and terrifying and wonderful sort of way. 

There was a sniff, a stifled cough. The faint clicking of displaced gear. She thought she could make out Chirrut praying under his breath. The air was still and stagnant, taking on the hot, wet quality of the world outside, slicking the back of her neck, matting her hair. Cassian shifted his weight, sliding against her. Her pulse quickened.

There was only so much room down there. If it hadn't been him, it would have been someone else.

Yeah, that was a load of Bantha fodder. She knew damn well she’d purposely chosen the spot beside him.

In the cadre, she'd enjoyed the benefit of knowing that she could trust the men and women beside her to commit to the mission, regardless of consequence. They'd give their lives in service to it, and with their dying breaths, they'd spit rage and fire and defiance into the face of the enemy. But that was not the same as being able to _rely_ on them. She'd learned, when she was far too young to have to learn something so cynical, that she couldn't, because the mission mattered more than the people, and the rage and fire were all-consuming, and they could be friendly but never really friends. Still, she'd liked being with them a lot better than she’d liked being alone afterwards. And it had felt nice, sometimes, to be able to tell herself that she had a purpose, that she was taking revenge on the great war machine that had ruined her life.

This was so very, very different.

He smelled like leather and engine oil. He was warm, warmer than mere body heat could account for, warm enough to tug at her gut. She chewed on her tongue.

It had been a while. The last time had been in the first few weeks she’d called herself Liana Hallick, many months before she'd been carted off to Wobani (and there sure as hell weren’t any opportunities for fraternization, there). But, well -- this was a fair bit more than just a desire for release, and she knew it. 

She had never burned like this for anything. She had never felt so certain of what she was doing, so much like she was a part of something, something that truly mattered. She had disabled cruisers; disrupted supply lines; planted detonators on combat assault tanks; rushed, like a madwoman, into clusters of Imperial troops, all under Saw’s unrelenting direction. But the old man had been so single-minded that much of what he'd done had turned right back in on itself. The center of his group had been hollow. And so, too, had been the center of herself.

That hollowness had deepened after he’d left her. The wound still throbbed. His explanations and declarations, and the gift he’d given her in the form of her father’s integrity, had soothed but not healed it. Not yet.

Overhead, boots struck metal, and then so did metal itself, harsh and clanging. The hold buzzed with the reverberations of three sets of footsteps. She tensed, and felt Cassian tense, as well; felt the widening of his stance, the movements of the muscles along his back and around his hip. The back of his thigh brushed against her knee, which straightened, reflexively, bringing her leg flush with his. _So warm._ She watched his band of volunteers ready themselves, some communicating through quick glances and signs. When this was through, she decided, she'd set about learning the Alliance's sign language.

Bodhi's voice drifted down to them. "Hey, you're probably looking for a manifest."

Cassian turned, slight. Unthinking, she’d slid her palm to his lower back. 

He had almost killed her father. But he hadn’t, and he’d been the first man in her life to tell her that he’d _stay_ , and to then go right ahead and do it. She could rely on him.

"That would be helpful."

Kay-too went rigid. Baze grinned up through the hatch, lifted his repeater cannon. The generator on his back hummed. Chirrut knocked his staff against the floor, once, twice, then centered it, pulled it toward his body, and tented his hands over its end.

“It’s just down here.”

She could rely on _all_ of them.

The spy, his body a solid certainty against her own, looked down at her over his shoulder. He was floating in that strange, heady liminal space that took a person right before confrontation: nervous, eager, swelling up with energy, vibrant and potent and in need of an outlet. She could tell, because it was all over his face and shoulders, and because she was right there with him. She ached to get this whole thing started, to move and to _do_. 

She wondered what it would be like to be with him.

He breathed. His eyes swept up, down. He pushed back against her hand, and she splayed her fingers.

“Ready?” he whispered. His breath washed over her face.

When this was through, maybe she’d set about finding out.


End file.
